Materials

One-off purchases of materials are also available from the donation system. Both rare and common materials are available to purchase in bulk amounts, to save gameplay time without violating the survival principle.

Donor lounge

All kit donors (players with one gold star or more on their name) also gain access to the DonorLoungewarp.

Why donations?

A voluntary donation system was chosen as a method to fund the server, over a subscription or purchase system. The current service uses donations specifically, with rewards for donating. A subscription or purchase mechanism could result in a banned person potentially legally claiming the service wasn't fulfilling it's level agreement. A similar issue could arrise when software is updated due to new releases from notch, with problems during the inital new code release causing service downtime. If the kits and items were offered as purchases, there would also be tax issues which don't arise with charitable donations.

Instead, the player is offered a chance to voluntarily donate one of multiple specified amounts, and a free in-game gift is offered by way of thanks.

What bit of hardware will my donation go towards?

This is not a question that can be answered simply; while the cost might be imagined purely in hardware terms, in fact the majority of costs are recurring.

Detailed accounting is kept but while the outgoings are continuous, they are not constant - for instance the colocation of the server, advertising in various locations, and other more spurious costs vary from month to month.

Hence it's not normally possible to state that the next X amount of funds will go towards more RAM, for instance, because a rolling buffer of credit for server rent, advertising etc must be maintained on top of savings for specific improvements.

Bitcoin

As of 20 May 2013, MinecraftOnline accepts donations by Bitcoin to the equivalent value of their GBP prices, as an alternative to Paypal. Bitcoin donation buttons appear alongside Paypal buttons for the kit upgrades. Every user gets an account allocated to them, and it's possible to pay by instalments across multiple transactions, potentially taking advantage of Bitcoin's volatile growth rate and avoiding unnecessary exchange fees. The Bitcoin exchange rate is polled from online real currency exchanges in realtime.

Trivia

Due to the success of this style of donation system, MinecraftOnline has inspired several Clone Servers throughout its history, equipped with identically laid out donation kits.